At first, biographical writings were regarded merely as a subsection of history with a focus on a particular individual of historical importance. The independent genre of biography as distinct from general history writing, began to emerge in the 18th century and reached its contemporary form at the turn of the 20th century.
Historical biography Biography is the earliest literary genre in history. According to Egyptologist
Miriam Lichtheim, writing took its first steps toward literature in the context of the private tomb funerary inscriptions. These were commemorative biographical texts recounting the careers of deceased high royal officials. The earliest biographical texts are from the 26th century BC. In the 21st century BC, another famous biography was composed in Mesopotamia about
Gilgamesh.
One of the five versions could be historical. From the same region a couple of centuries later, according to
another famous biography, departed
Abraham.
He and his 3 descendants became subjects of ancient Hebrew biographies whether fictional or historical.
Xenophon (c. 430 – 355/354 BC) wrote the
biography of Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire. One of the earliest Roman biographers was
Cornelius Nepos, who published his work
Excellentium Imperatorum Vitae ("Lives of outstanding generals") in 44 BC. Longer and more extensive biographies were written in Greek by
Plutarch, in his
Parallel Lives, published about 80 A.D. In this work famous Greeks are paired with famous Romans, for example, the orators
Demosthenes and
Cicero, or the generals
Alexander the Great and
Julius Caesar; some fifty biographies from the work survive. Another well-known collection of ancient biographies is
De vita Caesarum ("On the Lives of the Caesars") by
Suetonius, written about AD 121 in the time of the emperor
Hadrian. Meanwhile, in the eastern imperial periphery,
Gospel described the life of
Jesus. In the early
Middle Ages (AD 400 to 1450), there was a decline in awareness of the
classical culture in Europe. During this time, the only repositories of knowledge and records of the early history in Europe were those of the
Roman Catholic Church.
Hermits,
monks, and
priests used this historic period to write biographies. Their subjects were usually restricted to the
church fathers,
martyrs,
popes, and
saints. Their works were meant to be inspirational to the people and vehicles for
conversion to
Christianity (see
Hagiography). One significant secular example of a biography from this period is the
life of Charlemagne by his courtier
Einhard. In
Medieval Western India, there was a
Sanskrit Jain literary genre of writing semi-historical biographical narratives about the lives of famous persons called
Prabandhas. Prabandhas were written primarily by
Jain scholars from the 13th century onwards and were written in colloquial Sanskrit (as opposed to
Classical Sanskrit). The earliest collection explicitly titled
Prabandha- is
Jinabhadra's
Prabandhavali (1234 CE). In
Medieval Islamic Civilization ( to 1258), similar traditional Muslim biographies of
Muhammad and other important figures in the early
history of Islam began to be written, beginning the
Prophetic biography tradition. Early
biographical dictionaries were published as compendia of famous Islamic personalities from the 9th century onwards. They contained more social data for a large segment of the population than other works of that period. The earliest biographical dictionaries initially focused on the lives of the
prophets of Islam and
their companions, with one of these early examples being
The Book of The Major Classes by
Ibn Sa'd al-Baghdadi. And then began the documentation of the lives of many other historical figures (from rulers to scholars) who lived in the medieval Islamic world. 's
The Book of Martyrs, was one of the earliest English-language biographies. By the late Middle Ages, biographies became less church-oriented in Europe as biographies of
kings,
knights, and
tyrants began to appear. The most famous of such biographies was ''
Le Morte d'Arthur'' by Sir
Thomas Malory. The book was an account of the life of the fabled
King Arthur and his
Knights of the Round Table. Following Malory, the new emphasis on
humanism during the
Renaissance promoted a focus on secular subjects, such as artists and poets, and encouraged writing in the vernacular.
Giorgio Vasari's
Lives of the Artists (1550) was the landmark biography focusing on secular lives. Vasari made celebrities of his subjects, as the
Lives became an early "bestseller". Two other developments are noteworthy: the development of the
printing press in the 15th century and the gradual increase in
literacy. Biographies in the English language began appearing during the reign of
Henry VIII.
John Foxe's
Actes and Monuments (1563), better known as ''Foxe's Book of Martyrs'', was essentially the first dictionary of the biography in Europe, followed by
Thomas Fuller's
The History of the Worthies of England (1662), with a distinct focus on public life. Influential in shaping popular conceptions of pirates,
A General History of the Pyrates (1724), by Charles Johnson, is the prime source for the biographies of many well-known pirates. A notable early collection of biographies of eminent men and women in the
United Kingdom was
Biographia Britannica (1747–1766) edited by
William Oldys. The American biography followed the English model, incorporating
Thomas Carlyle's view that biography was a part of history. Carlyle asserted that the lives of great human beings were essential to understanding society and its institutions. While the historical impulse would remain a strong element in early American biography, American writers carved out a distinct approach. What emerged was a rather didactic form of biography, which sought to shape the individual character of a reader in the process of defining national character.
Emergence of the genre wrote what many consider to be the first modern biography,
The Life of Samuel Johnson, in 1791. The first modern biography, and a work that exerted considerable influence on the evolution of the genre, was
James Boswell's
The Life of Samuel Johnson, a biography of lexicographer and man-of-letters
Samuel Johnson published in 1791. While Boswell's personal acquaintance with his subject only began in 1763, when Johnson was 54 years old, Boswell covered the entirety of Johnson's life by means of additional research. Itself an important stage in the development of the modern
genre of biography, it has been claimed to be the greatest biography written in the
English language. Boswell's work was unique in its level of research, which involved archival study, eye-witness accounts and interviews, its robust and attractive narrative, and its honest depiction of all aspects of Johnson's life and character – a formula which serves as the basis of biographical literature to this day. Biographical writing generally stagnated during the 19th century – in many cases there was a reversal to the more familiar
hagiographical method of eulogizing the dead, similar to the biographies of
saints produced in
Medieval times. A distinction between mass biography and
literary biography began to form by the middle of the century, reflecting a breach between high culture and
middle-class culture. However, the number of biographies in print experienced a rapid growth, thanks to an expanding reading public. This revolution in publishing made books available to a larger audience of readers. In addition, affordable
paperback editions of popular biographies were published for the first time.
Periodicals began publishing a sequence of biographical sketches.
Autobiographies became more popular, as with the rise of education and cheap printing, modern concepts of fame and celebrity began to develop. Autobiographies were written by authors, such as
Charles Dickens (who incorporated autobiographical elements in his novels) and
Anthony Trollope (his
Autobiography appeared posthumously, quickly becoming a bestseller in
London), philosophers, such as
John Stuart Mill, churchmen –
John Henry Newman – and entertainers –
P. T. Barnum.
Modern biography The sciences of
psychology and
sociology were ascendant at the turn of the 20th century and would heavily influence the new century's biographies. The demise of the
"great man" theory of history was indicative of the emerging mindset. Human behavior would be explained through
Darwinian theories. "Sociological" biographies conceived of their subjects' actions as the result of the environment, and tended to downplay individuality. The development of
psychoanalysis led to a more penetrating and comprehensive understanding of the biographical subject, and induced biographers to give more emphasis to
childhood and
adolescence. Clearly these psychological ideas were changing the way biographies were written, as a culture of autobiography developed, in which the telling of one's own story became a form of therapy. The conventional concept of heroes and narratives of success disappeared in the obsession with psychological explorations of personality. '' set the standard for 20th century biographical writing, when it was published in 1918. British critic
Lytton Strachey revolutionized the art of biographical writing with his 1918 work
Eminent Victorians, consisting of biographies of four leading figures from the
Victorian era:
Cardinal Manning,
Florence Nightingale,
Thomas Arnold, and
General Gordon. Strachey set out to breathe life into the
Victorian era for future generations to read. Up until this point, as Strachey remarked in the preface, Victorian biographies had been "as familiar as the
cortège of the undertaker", and wore the same air of "slow, funereal barbarism." Strachey defied the tradition of "two fat volumes... of undigested masses of material" and took aim at the four iconic figures. His narrative demolished the myths that had built up around these cherished national heroes, whom he regarded as no better than a "set of mouth bungled hypocrites". The book achieved worldwide fame due to its irreverent and witty style, its concise and factually accurate nature, and its artistic prose. In the 1920s and 1930s, biographical writers sought to capitalize on Strachey's popularity by imitating his style. This new school featured iconoclasts, scientific analysts, and fictional biographers and included
Gamaliel Bradford,
André Maurois, and
Emil Ludwig, among others.
Robert Graves (
I, Claudius, 1934) stood out among those following Strachey's model of "debunking biographies." The trend in
literary biography was accompanied in popular biography by a sort of "celebrity voyeurism", in the early decades of the century. This latter form's appeal to readers was based on curiosity more than morality or patriotism. By
World War I, cheap hard-cover reprints had become popular. The decades of the 1920s witnessed a biographical "boom." American professional historiography gives a limited role to biography, preferring instead to emphasize deeper social and cultural influences. Political biographers historically incorporated moralizing judgments into their work, with scholarly biography being an uncommon genre before the mid-1920s.
Allan Nevins was a major contributor in the 1930s to the multivolume
Dictionary of American Biography. Nevins also sponsored a series of long political biographies. Later biographers sought to show how political figures balanced power and responsibility. However, many biographers found that their subjects were not as morally pure as they originally thought, and young historians after 1960 tended to be more critical. The exception is
Robert Remini whose books on Andrew Jackson idolize its hero and fends off criticisms. The study of decision-making in politics is important for scholarly political biographers, who can take different approaches such as focusing on psychology/personality, bureaucracy/interests, fundamental ideas, or societal forces. However, most documentation favors the first approach, which emphasizes personalities. Biographers often neglect the voting blocs and legislative positions of politicians and the organizational structures of bureaucracies. A more promising approach is to locate a person's ideas through intellectual history, but this has become more difficult with the philosophical shallowness of political figures in recent times. Political biography can be frustrating and challenging to integrate with other fields of political history. The feminist scholar
Carolyn Heilbrun observed that women's biographies and autobiographies began to change character during the second wave of
feminist activism. She cited
Nancy Milford's 1970 biography
Zelda, as the "beginning of a new period of women's biography, because "[only] in 1970 were we ready to read not that
Zelda had destroyed
Fitzgerald, but Fitzgerald her: he had usurped her narrative." Heilbrun named 1973 as the turning point in women's autobiography, with the publication of
May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, for that was the first instance where a woman told her life story, not as finding "beauty even in pain" and transforming "rage into spiritual acceptance," but acknowledging what had previously been forbidden to women: their pain, their rage, and their "open admission of the desire for power and control over one's life."
Recent years In recent years,
multimedia biography has become more popular than traditional literary forms. Along with documentary
biographical films,
Hollywood produced numerous commercial films based on the lives of famous people. The popularity of these forms of biography have led to the proliferation of TV channels dedicated to biography, including
A&E,
The Biography Channel, and
The History Channel. CD-ROM and online biographies have also appeared. Unlike books and films, they often do not tell a chronological narrative: instead they are archives of many discrete media elements related to an individual person, including video clips, photographs, and text articles. Biography-Portraits were created in 2001, by the German artist
Ralph Ueltzhoeffer. Media scholar
Lev Manovich says that such archives exemplify the database form, allowing users to navigate the materials in many ways. General "life writing" techniques are a subject of scholarly study. In recent years, debates have arisen as to whether all biographies are fiction, especially when authors are writing about figures from the past. President of Wolfson College at Oxford University,
Hermione Lee argues that all history is seen through a perspective that is the product of one's contemporary society and as a result, biographical truths are constantly shifting. So, the history biographers write about will not be the way that it happened; it will be the way they remembered it. Debates have also arisen concerning the importance of space in life-writing. Daniel R. Meister in 2017 argued that: :Biography Studies is emerging as an independent discipline, especially in the Netherlands. This Dutch School of biography is moving biography studies away from the less scholarly life writing tradition and towards history by encouraging its practitioners to utilize an approach adapted from microhistory.
Biographical research Biographical research is defined by Miller as a research method that collects and analyses a person's whole life, or portion of a life, through the in-depth and unstructured interview, or sometimes reinforced by semi-structured interview or personal documents. It is a way of viewing social life in procedural terms, rather than static terms. The information can come from "oral history, personal narrative, biography and autobiography" or "diaries, letters, memoranda and other materials". The central aim of biographical research is to produce rich descriptions of persons or "conceptualise structural types of actions", which means to "understand the action logics or how persons and structures are interlinked". This method can be used to understand an individual's life within its social context or understand the cultural phenomena.
Critical issues There are many largely unacknowledged pitfalls to writing good biographies, and these largely concern the relation between firstly the individual and the context, and, secondly, the private and public. Paul James writes: == Book awards ==